DataCenter Costs
Cost in a Data Center After a period of observation, in this small article I’m listing most of the costs that I found i had to manage in coping with a DataCenter. *'Server costs (A)': With this and all other hardware components, you’re specifically interested in the total annual cost of ownership, which normally consists of the cost of hardware support plus some amortization cost for the purchase of the hardware. *'Storage costs (B)': In situations where a storage area network (SAN) or network attached store (NAS) is used for an application, a proportional cost over the whole SAN or NAS needs to be determined, including management and support cost for the hardware. *'Network costs ©': This needs to be carefully considered because the fact that an application moves into the cloud does not necessarily mean that all the network traffic it generates disappears. For example, data may need to be pulled from the application’s database to be added to a data warehouse. Alternatively, when Web applications are moved into the cloud, corporate Internet bandwidth requirements may be reduced. Clearly, the ability to access external applications requires substantial bandwidth. *'Backup and archive costs (D)': The actual savings on backup costs depends on what the backup strategy will be when the application moves into the cloud. The same is true of archiving. Will all backup be done in the cloud? Will your organization still be required to back up a percentage of critical data? *'Disaster recovery costs (E)': In theory, the cloud service will have its own disaster recovery capabilities, so there may be a consequential savings on disaster recovery. However, you need to clearly understand what your cloud provider’s disaster recovery capability is. Not all cloud providers have the same definition of disaster recovery. IT management must determine the level of support the cloud provider will offer. *'Data center infrastructure costs (F)': A whole series of costs including electricity, floor space, cooling, building maintenance, and so on can’t easily be attributed to individual applications, but can usually be assigned on the basis of the floor space that the hardware running the application occupies. For that reason, try to calculate a floor space factor for every application. For example, if your data center is only 40 percent full, the economics of putting lots of additional capacity into the cloud is not financially viable. However, if your data center is 90 percent full and has been expand-ing at 10 percent a year, you’ll run out of data center next year. At that point, you may have to build a data center that could cost as much as $5 million. The cloud will be a much more economical choice. *'Platform costs (G)': Some applications only run in specific operating environments — Windows, Linux, HP-UX, IBM zOS, and so on. The annual maintenance costs for the application operating environment need to be known and calculated as part of the overall costs. *'Software maintenance costs (package software) (H): Normally this cost element is simple because it comes down to the software’s annual maintenance cost. However, it may be complicated if the software license is tied to processor pricing. The situation could be further complicated if the specific software license is part of a bundled deal. *'Software maintenance costs (in-house software) (I)': Such costs exist for all in-house software, but may not be broken out at an application level. For example, database licenses used across many different applications may be calculated at a corporate level. It may be necessary to allocate these database cost at a per-application level. There may also be these kinds of costs for packaged software if in-house components have been added or if integration components have been built to connect this application to other applications *'Help desk support costs (J)': It’s necessary to analyze all help desk calls at an application level to determine the contribution of an application (if any) to help desk activity. The support costs for some applications may be anomalous and may disappear with the movement into the cloud. Some applications require more support than others. Understanding the different support requirements is key to making the right decision on the cloud. *'Operational support personnel costs (K)': There is a whole set of day-to-day operational costs associated with running any application. Some are general costs that apply to every application, including staff support for everything from storage and archiving, to patch management and net-works and security. Some support tasks, however, may be particular to a given application, such as database tuning and performance management. *'Infrastructure software costs (L)': A whole set of infrastructure management software is in use in any installation, and it has an associated cost. For example, management software is typically used for many different applications and can’t easily be divided across specific applications.